A little bit of back-door bragging, @Baseball_Fan? You can afford to sit on 20 years' worth of a security-cushion? Unimaginable to me. And we live modestly.

Not so fast. Depending on one’s macro view, a mix of cash, T Bills and gold might be a good long term investment. Not everyone thinks equities are the ultimate growth vehicle. I think BB’s “allocation” a bit extreme - but who knows? The whole world rolls over every 24-hours.

”I would not be comfortable having anything less than 20 years of cash/tbill/gold (not paper) of funding for your current lifestyle living...”

Not intended as investment advice. However, @Baseball_Fan might want to take a look at PRPFX.
Gold 25%
Silver 5%
Dollar assets / Treasury Bonds 35%
There’s 65% of the asset mix you identify. Just saying …
Link to Permanent Portfolio website and allocation model

Or ... we can see now (sort of). Using the conventional 30 year horizon and the usual 4%/year (inflation adjusted) assumed spend down amount, a 20 year cash cushion would result in 80% in cash, 20% invested. Setting aside 5 years of cash would result in 20% in cash, 80% invested.
Portfolio Visualizer only goes back to 1985, but that covers the 1987 crash, the dot com bust, and the great financial crisis. Run PV through 30 year periods (or to 2024 when starting after 1994), rebalance annually, withdraw 4% annually, inflation adjusted.
The worst start year, not surprisingly, is 2000. That's starting with a market collapse and going through another one in the same decade. A lost decade for large cap stocks.
Here are the nominal results of three portfolios from Jan 2000 - Dec 2023. The first starting with 20 years of cash, the second with 5 years of cash and the rest in VFINX. The third with 5 years of cash and the rest invested 60/40 VFINX/VBMFX. After the 24 year period ...
20% stock/80% cash - 14% remaining (7.7% inflation adjusted)
80% stock/20% cash - 42% remaining (23% inflation adjusted)
48% stock/32% bond/20% cash - 73% remaining (40% inflation adjusted)
For the remaining six years, you'd like at least 24% (4% x six years) remaining in real dollars. The 80/20 mix almost makes it, and the balanced portfolio makes it with ease.
If you're wondering what would happen to the 80% cash portfolio without rebalancing, it would have come out about the same (a half percent worse). The others would have come out worse than with rebalancing.
Here's the PV run. You can experiment with it yourself.
Many years ago, Suze Orman said she was keeping almost all of her assets in TIPS. Which was fine for her - she didn't need to grow her portfolio and TIPS wouldn't be degraded by inflation. That doesn't work for most people, who need growth even in retirement. (4% withdrawals with no growth lasts only 25 years.)
I think @Crash said something similar, though in a different way.

I gave up on EM and International stuff some years ago. Way back in '08-09, I did very well with EM bonds. Took some good advice from someone here and re-diversified soon after the GFC. Europe, it seems to me, will forever be playing both ends off the middle: a common currency, but no central, unified budget. Each country does its own thing. In 2009, I was getting crucified visiting Ireland with the exchange rate at $1.51 to the euro. But now? Big difference. As screwed up and indebted as we are in the US, it's the cleanest dirty shirt in the hamper. Africa is a hot mess forever. Middle East? Not a word is necessary.

A little bit of back-door bragging, @Baseball_Fan? You can afford to sit on 20 years' worth of a security-cushion? Unimaginable to me. And we live modestly.

@msf...I would not be comfortable having anything less than 20 years of cash/tbill/gold (not paper) of funding for your current lifestyle living...and then, only then invest in the markets. Ya, I know, most would say this is nuts....my reply would be, ya, ok, we'll see.
Kind Regards to ALL,
Baseball Fan

Just goes to show that the stock market is NOT a utility, doesn't care that you need 7% annual returns to fund your retirement and it is very risky...what have we had like TWO, 50%+ drawdowns in the past 15 years or something and another couple -20%.......it exists to provide capital to fund companies so they theoretically can grow their business.
A lot of this looking backwards is just a bunch of hooey...what if...what if...so much is different...most successful companies now have way less employees, use way less capital...market valuations have trended higher in the past what 20 years or something? Sooo much more private and gov't debt out there....It's like saying "the last time the Yankees played in a World Series 12 years ago where they had home field advantage they won...never mind that only 2 playes were on the team then, they are playing a different team etc etc...(this is a hypothetical example)..like WTF does the recovery time in 1974 etc etc have anything to do with today? Please.
Jared Dillian said it best recently..."a lot of "investing" is just entertainment"...that is why crap like CNBC exists....the largest comedy show on TV these days...
All that being said, as long as we don't go full blown Bolshie in this country and still have a semblence of Capitalism, I would not bet against the USA...but am thinking you might not be able to do better than a Berkshire that owns blue chips stocks, well run relevant businesses, utilities, railroads, insurance companies...AND has what $150B of Tbills...might be the way to go, who knows?

But if you look at how long it has taken the SP500 to get back to a previous high permanently, it is 13 years in recent memory, and it took 25 years after September 1929.
According to Mark Hulbert,

On a dividend- and inflation-adjusted basis, the broad stock market had recovered from the 1929 collapse by March 1937, only 7½ years later.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-from-the-dot-com-bust-11583192099
He doesn't define what "broad stock market" means, though he does observe that the DJIA took a lot longer to recover because it was full of stocks that underperformed the market. And the S&P 500 started only in 1957, though various people have approximated the index going backward.
The 13 years mentioned for the S&P 500 to recover likewise seems to overstate the time for recovery of the broader market, even after accounting for inflation. Hulbert wrote (in 2020) that

The longest recovery time in U.S. history was from the 1973-74 bear market: It wasn’t until the end of 1984 that the broad market, on an inflation- and dividend-adjusted basis, was back to where it stood at its January 1973 peak—nearly 12 years later.

Here's a table of S&P 500 recovery times, including divs and adjustments for inflation/deflation:

Source: https://monevator.com/bear-market-recovery/
That piece primarily discusses UK data. It reports that Wade Pfau calculated the recovery time for the 1972-74 bear market in the UK was 11 years (compared with Hulbert's 12 in the US). But in nominal terms, it took less than five years to recover. That suggests that inflation could be as big a risk as sequence of returns.
When looking at how much cash to keep on hand, one should balance these risks. ISTM that five years cash is adequate, bearing in mind that it's not critical to recover all the way (in real terms) to the prior peak. Getting well along the way to recovery can suffice.

@yogibearbull Thanks for reply. A few years back I had a margin charge! I called the rep & told him I had no margin account, he said he'd look into it. A day or two later & charge disappeared. Operator error I guess.

Just an update. I beleive the post for RSIIX vs OSTIX challenge was on the weekend on April 22m, 2023 (but the MFO can determine). The performance contest was written for the next 12 months with David Snowball determing the winner based on attributes (as total return may be the sole variable or perhaps a combo with volaitility) solely at his discretion. The language was "Fund is considered the best based on the next 12 months"
Summary based on total return per Bloomberg:
Apr 22, 2022 thru Jan 14, 2023 has OSTIX at 9.02% which is significantly leading RSIIX at 6.64%. OSTIX outperformance can be attributed to the Nov and Dec robust rally in which OSTIX captured a lot more upside. As for 3 year comparison, RSIIX is ahead and for 5 years, the two funds are neck & neck.
Regardless of the outcome, I will enjoy the dinner and I am sure I will learn much since our styles and execution are different.

“Hats-off” to Charles Lynn Bolin for his exceptional article: ”Asset Allocation and Withdrawal Strategies in Retirement” in the January issue of The Observer. In early December, returning home from a short trip to Florida, I hastily tossed up a thread - ”New Report: All Stock Portfolio Beats Stock and Bond Mix Over Time (Originally From Bloomberg)” while awaiting a connection at Chicago’s O’Hare. Time was short. I had no idea the thread would garner so many insightful comments from board members - let alone become the genesis for a future article in The Observer.
Charle’s article is so comprehensive and rich in documentation that any attempt to summarize or characterize it by me seems futile. He begins by linking to the thread, followed by a listing of a dozen or so different aspects of the study’s premise as identified by discussion participants. This is followed by literally reams of historical data. In essence, he’s trying to identify the “right balance” among risk, time span, relative asset performance over different time periods, withdrawal strategies, etc.
While stocks have beaten other investments over the past 130 years, Charles notes that most of us have a somewhat shorter investment horizon. And he identifies some potentially more reasonable risk-averse approaches: ”To illustrate the benefits of having a balanced portfolio, from 1999 until 2020, the conservative Vanguard Wellesley (VWINX) and moderate Vanguard Wellington (VWELX) have beaten the S&P 500. This illustrates the importance of starting and ending points – sequence of return risk. A high allocation of stocks in 1999 could have impacted savings for the remainder of retirement.”
Finally, Charles outlines his own investment allocation and approach, which includes modifying his equity exposure (within a set range) from time to time based on his read of market conditions.

Thanks for the comments. For about the first 15 years of retirement, I focused on total returns to help determine the withdrawal amounts from my investment portfolio . This method turned out to be somewhat complicated and stressful due to significant sequence-of-returns variations in the annual returns. The chart above suggests that basing withdrawals from a prudently developed dividend stock portfolio may well be a sustainable way to guide withdrawal decisions that can somewhat reduce annual volatility. And, as @WABAC says, the simplicity of the approach has appeal. My portfolio is 70% invested in stocks. That complicates things a little bit because part of my dividend income comes from investments that are not stocks -- almost all bonds and money market investments in my case. Part of that income should be retained in the portfolio each year to compensate for any CPI increase during the year. In my case, this can easily be done at the end of the year when my once a year distribution is determined and made. The CPI for the year just ending can be multiplied by the 30% non-stock portion of the beginning of the year portfolio balance. That amount can then deducted from the total annual dividend income received to determine a suggested withdrawal amount for the year just ending. That is essentially the procedure I am currently using......

It all depends on when you need the money, and how much. People who retired in 2000 expecting to live on the returns of the SP500 were in trouble for a long time.
Most projections, like American Associations of Individual Investors claim 3 to 5 years of cash/short term bonds for living expenses above pension and SS is enough to ride out "Any" market decline. But if you look at how long it has taken the SP500 to get back to a previous high permanently, it is 13 years in recent memory, and it took 25 years after September 1929.
I agree we live in different times than 1929, but 3 years of living expenses is not much of a cushion for a recent retiree. Unfortunately, most people don't even have that.
As for medical progress, we kept patients hospitalized for days after gallbladders ( 7-10 days) Heart attacks ( at least a week) and hip surgery ( a week) in 1978. I was home walking up stairs a the night of surgery after my hip replacement in 2021. My wife had a grapefruit sized benign tumor taken out of her chest in 2018. She went home in 2 days.

Trying to convince myself to diversify and invest in small cap and internationals, and expanding FT1000 observation:
From 1 January 2000 to 1 January 2013 SPY moved up only 2%. During the same time, Vanguard International Value VTRIX was 84% up, and Vanguard Small Cap VSMAX was 131% up.
As for the next 10 years, see https://www.morningstar.com/portfolios/experts-forecast-stock-bond-returns-2024-edition

”Two weeks ago, I hiked with a heart surgeon. He retired 10 years ago and told me that in the last 10 years, things changed and advanced so quickly and much faster than in the previous 40 years.”
It’s truly incredible. My first (of several) eye surgeries in the early 70s required a 2-night hospital stay, horrific pain for a day or two and rendered mediocre results. The last one five-six years ago was accomplished in an hour’s time in an outpatient setting while fully clothed - shoes and all. No pain. Terrific results. A lot of eye surgery is done under local anesthesia (for medical reasons) so that you are aware of and listening to the surgical team during the entire process. On that first one in the 70s they were frantically running around looking for a needed instrument they couldn’t / never did locate. On the last one the surgeon was discussing with colleagues her plan to fly to Colorado with her husband for a ski trip at the end of the day. :)

From reading articles and watching markets:
1) It is known that the US stock market is the best LT. Bogle, Buffett, and Malkiel (Random Walk) told us for a long time to invest mainly in the SP500 or VTI.
2) The further you go in the past, the less it matters. How 1802 is similar to 2000+. We are more advanced, and things are developed much faster and influence our lives. Two weeks ago, I hiked with a heart surgeon. He retired 10 years ago and told me that in the last 10 years, things changed and advanced so quickly and much faster than in the previous 40 years.
3) In the ST (months-years) bonds can do better. The SP500 lost money over 10 years in 2000-2010, see (https://schrts.co/sSpxKTXr). Indexes for total bond, SC, Value, and International beat it.
This is why I always believed and practiced investing in what works lately using a wide range of categories.

The typical pattern of these annual Roundtables is that Part 1 has lots of macro/big-picture stuff on markets, economy, geopolitics, followed by specific recommendations by only 2-3 panelists. Then, Parts 2 and 3 will have recommendations from the rest of the panelists.
In some years, there are only 2 parts, but 3 parts are mentioned for 2024. Frankly, Part 3 gets quite stale, and all the stuff has leaked out by then. Remember that this year the Roundtable was held on January 8, 2024.
Rarely, if there is some huge event, Barron's may reach out to the remaining panelists for revisions to their upcoming recommendations.
There were 2 new panelists this year - John Rogers (Ariel) and Rajiv Jain (GQG).
In comparing with 2023 Roundtable, Rupal Bhansali left Ariel to start her own firm, and Ariel CEO Rogers replaced her. There was 1 net addition in that 2023 had 10 panelists, 2024 had 11.
Mario Gabelli has been a Roundtable member for as long as I have followed these Roundtables.

Thanks for putting that together, @hank. Sonal Desai was just on "Real Yield" again, on Friday evening. Reasoned, smart, easy to listen to. Years ago, I realized that Abby Joseph Cohen is a perma-bull. And often missed the mark, when checking results after she'd offered something. The entire Panel certainly are among the most eminent to be found.

Barron’s Subtitle: “The Market’s Gains Won’t Come Easy From Here”
This is the first of two sessions. This year’s participants are: John W. Rogers Jr., Todd Ahlsten, Meryl Witmer, Rajiv Jain, Mario Gabelli, Scott Black, David Giroux, Sonal Desai, William Priest, Henry Ellenbogen, Abby Joseph Cohen.
It’s an insightful free-wheeling discussion. Short on specific buy recommendations but an exhaustive look at how investing is likely to be affected by domestic / geopolitics (in the broadest sense) along with the economic backdrop. Most foresee a flat to down year for U.S. equities. David Giroux expects a range of +5% / -5% this year - but looking out 5 years sees annual returns in the 6.5% area. He wasn’t too explicit, but seemed to be referencing his own fund (PRWCX) which he termed a “balanced” fund.
Giroux’s list of “likes” is long (excerpt): ”We see good value in managed care, life-sciences tools, utility stocks, and waste. We still see good value in companies like Microsoft, Intuit, and Salesforce, which has a low valuation … we are seeing good value in energy now as some supply-and-demand dynamics have changed.” And he’s still likes “high quality high yield bonds” (The latter struck me as a bit of an oxymoron.)
Graham Holdings (GHC) was recommended strongly by Witmer. Others joined in and much time was devoted to its numerous components including broadcasting, education and health care. It hurt a bit because I recently unloaded this one after what I thought was a nice run-up. Knowing when to sell a stock is a skill that escapes me. Deere (DE) is another stock that received favorable comment.
Participants noted that the economists / market prognosticators were nearly 100% wrong a year ago when recession was widely seen as “baked in the cake” and the market appeared headed for another bad year. Someone quipped that every year one of them says “It’s a stock picker’s market.” (When isn’t it?) Much was said of the approaching U.S. election and mostly with foreboding. One of the “optimists” (Witmer) predicted the U.S. will somehow “muddle through” without significant damage. Some think the markets will rebound late in the year after the election. The eternal optimism of Buffett and Templeton were noted in this regard. But the general feeling was far from optimistic. Most (if not all) find big cap valuations too rich, while small cap value is greatly undervalued. “De-globalization” is seen by some as a headwind, reducing efficiencies and adding costs for consumers. Franklin’s Sonal Desai says the “real interest rate” (inflation +) is in the 4-5% range - much above what the market currently assumes - implying rates will rise by year’s end.
Really recommend this article!

Than there’s Mario Gabelli in this week’s Barron’s who, after citing a litany of ominous signs, including budget deficits and a recent 50% drawdown in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, shrugs them off and says:
”But what does it matter? Short-termism is prevalent as algorithms, momentum investing, and exchange-traded funds influence trading. The Dow industrials will be the equivalent of 1,000,000 in 40 years and was under 1,000 about 40 years ago. So, invest long term.”
Gabelli’s point is later reaffirmed by Henry Ellenbogen (no investing lightweight):
“I agree with Mario: You have to take a long-term view and be positive on the prospects for the U.S. The agility and ability of the American business sector is like nothing else in the world”.
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Excerpts from: ”The Market’s Gains Won’t Come Easy From Here, Barron’s Roundtable Pros Say. 8 Stocks for Now.” Barron’s January 15, 2024